Daredevil: Born Again season 2, episode 7 is now streaming on Disney+, and "The Hateful Darkness" ended with another significant casualty. This one arguably hit a lot harder than Vanessa Fisk, however.
Spoilers follow.
Daniel Blake effectively sealed his fate when he struck up a friendship with BB Urich , who had been using him as a source of information for her anti-Fisk videos since the very beginning. With Buck Cashman putting pressure on the young Deputy Mayor of Communications to find the leak in Fisk's office, Daniel decides to be a "team player" and drive BB to her inevitable demise.
When Urich realizes the danger she's in, she asks Blake if this is the "person you want to be," which seems to hit him with the full weight of what he was about to do. Blake gives BB her phone and tells her to get as far away as possible before confronting Buck and defiantly telling him to go F*ck himself.
Cashman brutally beats Daniel, before reluctantly executing him with a bullet to the head.
During an interview with TV Insider, actor Michael Gandolfini revealed that his character was originally going to survive, and he even shot some scenes for next week's season finale..
"So, the crazy part is Daniel originally lives, and we shot [some scenes for] Episode 8, and as we were going through, I was just shocked. I was so grateful that he had this amazing arc, not every non-superhero character gets that, and I was so lucky that they gave it to me, and after we had shot [Episode] 7 and we were shooting 8, there was this weird thing of like, 'OK, he had this great run, this great arc, what’s next?' I don’t think there’s really anywhere for him, and we had talked about some ideas, but these seasons are made in a vacuum; you can’t really think about Season 3. And I was just like, 'I don’t know, it feels weird, it just doesn’t really make sense.' So they came back to me, and they were like, 'Hey, so we actually are going to kill you in [Episode 7].' And it just felt so right.
It felt so freeing, and I remember saying, 'Hey, if I didn’t think it was right, I’d fight it.' I love Daniel, but it’s so right. Where else is he gonna go? And he gets this little hero’s moment, and it just felt so great, I just felt so lucky. Again it’s hard, you’ve got Bullseye, Fisk, Karen Page, Matt Murdock, and including other like people from the comics, so sometimes, characters that don’t have superpowers don’t have the longest arcs, and they’re there to support the superheroes, which is great, but the fact that Daniel got to have this, I just felt so touched and that they trusted me… there’s only so much screen time that you get every episode, and so like the fact that they gave me a real journey to go on, I was very lucky."
In a separate interview with Variety, Buck actor Arty Froushan explains how this scenario would have played out for his character.
“Buck had to face up to Fisk, but he doesn’t admit it. He lies to Fisk’s face, basically, and says, ‘I killed him,’ but obviously he doesn’t.”
Showrunner Dario Scardapane notes that keeping Blake alive “was kind of meh and a non-story… Sometimes the arc is built in and you’re extending it a little too far. Like, wait a second. He and Buck, in their twisted friendship, both had to be true to who they were. That’s the last moment because everything afterwards seemed kind of like a weird, lame coda that didn’t pay off.”
Across eight gripping episodes, survival, resistance and redemption collide as the battle for the soul of New York begins," reads the season 2 synopsis. "In Season 2, Mayor Wilson Fisk crushes New York City underfoot as he hunts down public enemy number one, the Hell’s Kitchen vigilante known as Daredevil. But beneath the horned mask, Matt Murdock will try to fight back from the shadows to tear down the Kingpin’s corrupt empire and redeem his home. Resist. Rebel. Rebuild."